KIRKUS REVIEW

A lively, richly detailed story of one slice of the Irish
immigrant experience in America.

Orphaned in the famine—“all
that was left in Ireland was the potato for eating and when the potato was lost
there was nothing left in old Ireland”—Thomas McNulty is fresh off the boat in
the U.S. when he finds himself wearing blue, packed off to the West to fight
Indians. He's fortunate to have a friend in young John Cole, of a loving if
potentially lethal bent. Other of his soldier friends are to varying degrees
bloodthirsty, psychotic, or crazy brave, and they work evil on every Indian
encampment they find until, sickened by it all, the two soldiers find
themselves caring for a young Sioux girl they call Winona. It is perfectly in
keeping with McNulty’s dark view of a world in which people are angels and
devils in equal measure: “I seen killer Irishmen and gentle souls but they’re
both the same,” he reflects, “they both have an awful fire burning inside them,
like they were just the carapace of a furnace.” Protecting Winona means putting
themselves in the path of their comrades, those among whom they have fought
from one end of the country to the other against Indians and secessionists.
Extending the McNulty saga from books such as The Temporary Gentleman (2014)
and The Secret Scripture (2008), Barry writes with a gloomy
gloriousness: everyone that crosses his pages is in mortal danger, but there’s
an elegant beauty even in the most fraught moments (“By Jesus he just drives
the knife into the chief’s side”). The story is full of casual, spectacular
violence, but none of it gratuitous, and with a fine closing moral: everyone
will try to kill you in America, but those who don’t are your friends, and, as
Thomas says, “the ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me.”

A pleasure for fans of Barry and his McNulty stories and a
contribution not just to Irish literature in English, but also the literature
of the American West.

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